790,000 sq.ft. program includes concert halls, exhibition spaces, a music incubator, interior and exterior public spaces, and administrative areas. The site encompasses an urban waterfront in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. International competition, 2010.

The twin poles of individual and collective life are everywhere present in pop music. From headphones to concerts, from musicians to the music industry, from downloaded songs to global distribution, pop music produces an endlessly changing dynamic across micro and macro scales. Its reverberations move nimbly among performers, audiences, and economies.

Circular Logic cultivates the agility of these cultural dynamics. The circular buildings that form program and public space slip into, out of, over, and under one another.

Circles don't abut. They ricochet off of, and through, one another. They overlap. They yield. They conquer. They encompass. They divide. They aggregate. They lock. They loosen. The city itself slides from land to water and back again. Functions combine with other functions. Routes cross. Views glance off of the constantly receding contours of the buildings' profiles. The spaces between these disks appear and disappear as interactive bas-reliefs made of objects, voids, paths, activities, plazas, and gardens.

The circle asserts geometric confidence along its arc while simultaneously generating myriad possibilities inside and outside that same arc. It leaves no doubt about architecture's identity, even as its incongruities create new and unexpected outcomes in the spaces it produces.

The circle catalyzes a set of relations with its own circular logic: an ambient whole filled with individual collectivities and collective individuals.